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  • De acá de este lado:Musings on Latina/o Poetry
  • Norma Elia Cantú (bio)

I welcomed the opportunity to gather poetry by contemporary poets in a special issue of Diálogo, for poetry has been at the center of my personal and I would say my professional life. As a child in Laredo, Texas—that border that is a “wound that will not heal” (25) as Anzaldúa claimed—I learned to declamar, memorizing poetry almost as soon as I learned to speak. I must say that all this was in Spanish, mi lengua materna. Our poetry, our games, our jokes—we lived it all in Spanish. Aun yacen en mi memoria los versos de aquel entonces, si vieras Mamita, qué lindas flores, amarillas, azules, de mil colores, along with other childhood rhymes such as, Un día por la mañana me decía mi mamá, / levántate Norma Elia, si no, le digo a tu papá. / Yo siendo una niña de carta cabal, me quedaba calladita. / ¿Qué no me oyes lucero? / ¿Lucero? Si ni candil soy. As I grew older, I left behind the children’s rhymes and then it was the longer poems such as El seminarista de los ojos negros, or Porque me dejé del vicio, that found a home in me. My cousin Magdalena (todos la conocen como “Mane”) declamaba con tal intensidad that she moved many listeners to tears. All of these cherished memories and the rich poetic experiences helped me resist the beatings and the fines for speaking Spanish in the south Texas classrooms of my childhood. They did not erase these poems from my memory, from my being.

I might even claim that poetry is in my genes. My maternal grandfather, he of the poetic name Maurilio Ramón, penned a romantic poem to my grandmother, Celia, that I discovered in my mother’s things. How I marveled at the fading penciled poem on the back of a picture she had given him. It is no wonder, then that I was writing poems in third grade and all through high school. But somewhere along the way I stopped writing poetry altogether. Yet, as an older student, I sat in a graduate English class reading Adrienne Rich, Sylvia Plath, and Anne Sexton, and I became a scholar of poetry. In the 1970s at the height of the Chicano Movement, when I was in graduate school, I returned to poetry with a vengeance, to the political and engaged poetry of the time but also to the masters that my education in the United States had denied me: Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Neruda, Lorca, and Machado, claro está. Pero también, Storni, Agustini, and Mistral. I became an avid student of these and many other poets. But it was through the Movimiento poets, though, that I learned the strongest lessons. Several of them, Alurista and Abelardo “Lalo” Delgado I met when I was in graduate school in Lincoln, Nebraska. It was Lalo, the “people’s poet” as he was known, who taught me a life-changing lesson about the power of poetry. At the off-campus event sponsored by the University, la gente (mostly working class along with some of us students), were gathered to hear Lalo read his poetry. The small hall was crowded, and as Lalo began to read in his booming voice, my trained “ear” discerned and judged using the critical tools I was learning in my doctoral classes: how can that be called poetry? It is bombastic, it is sentimental, it is definitely not poetry, I concluded. But then I glanced around at the audience and became unsettled in my assumptions. Here were elders, viejitas y viejitos, listening intently. One old woman wiped away tears as Lalo read. And then he read “Stupid America,” his signature poem that is an indictment of the educational system of the United States that does not recognize the knowledge and abilities Chicana and Chicano students possess, and I too was crying thinking of my siblings back in Texas who were experiencing exactly that, crying for my own experiences in the racist system. He got a standing ovation and I learned an...

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